23 Marduk, Akitu, Nebuchadnezzar II, Neo-Babylonian Empire, Ishtar Gate

For a Neo-Babylonian king to be considered legitimate back in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, he had to go through a ritual called taking the hand of Marduk. Marduk was the patron god of the city of Babylon and he was one of the most important gods in Mesopotamia. In this ritual, the king apparently held the hand of the sacred statue of Marduk while standing next to it. This showed that the god and the king ruled together. Marduk and his divine wife Zarpanitum lived in a vast temple called the Esangil at the centre of Babylon. But in 689 BCE, when invading Assyrians attacked Babylon, the troops of the Assyrian king Sennacherib removed the statue of Marduk and took it to Assyria. Marduk wasn't returned home until 668 BCE. No matter how much the Assyrian kings did during the intervening years to rebuild the city's monuments, Babylon was a city without a god for 21 years. Sennacherib's son Esarhaddon could and did call himself the king of Babylonia. But it didn't mean that Babylonians accepted him as their rightful king. That's because he couldn't go through the ritual of taking the hand of Marduk in Babylon. He couldn't because Marduk wasn't in Babylon. So in Babylonian eyes, their land had no true king for two decades. You might be thinking, why didn't the Babylonians just make a new statue of Marduk to replace the one that had been stolen? Well, for the Mesopotamians, it didn't work that way. At some point in the distant past, this very statue had been brought to life as Marduk. And as long as that statue existed, that was where Marduk was. So if the statue was away from Babylon, then Marduk was too. This was true of all gods and goddesses. But in Marduk's case, it wasn't just that the god was gone from the city. Babylonians felt that the whole orderly functioning of the universe was at risk when Marduk was away. In order to understand all of this, it helps to know something about the Babylonian New Year's festival, called the Akitu Festival. It was the big religious event of the Babylonian year, and it lasted for 12 days. But it could take place only when Marduk and the Babylonian king were both in town. We know what happened during the Akitu Festival because a ritual program was written down, recording all the actions that had to be performed and the words of all the prayers that had to be spoken. It's a fascinating document, revealing that the kings of Babylon had a very different role in their state religion than the kings of Assyria had. The kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which had lasted from 911 to 612 BCE, were high priests of the god Ashur, heads of the government and of the religion. Ashur was the great god of the Assyrian pantheon, equivalent to Marduk in Babylonia. In Babylonia, the king wasn't a priest, but he still had a vital role to play in the Akitu Festival. No one else could replace him. Now, most of the events of the festival were kept secret. Babylonian citizens weren't directly involved, but they trusted that the proper ceremonies were taking place. On the first days, deep in the most sacred halls of the Esangil Temple, priests purified themselves and recited prayers and sang hymns to Marduk and his divine wife Sarpanitum while standing right in front of their statues. The priests didn't call them by name, though. They called Marduk Bel, which meant Lord, and they called Sarpanitum Beltia, which meant Lady. This was fairly common across the Near East. You see the same idea in Canaan, in the Levant. There, the people referred to their great god as Baal, which also meant Lord. A crucial moment of the Akitu Festival was when the high priest recited out loud the entire text of the Babylonian creation epic. This was on the third day of the festival. The priest stood alone in the presence of the god, reminding him, by reciting the epic, of the history of the world and of Marduk's greatness and his role in maintaining cosmic order. This epic had a because it focused on their god, Marduk. The epic was set in the primordial past, and it told the story of how everything in the universe had come into being, and how Marduk came to be the king of the gods. The Babylonians believed that before anything else existed, there was water. Salty sea water was called Tiamat. She was a goddess. And sweet spring water was Apsu. He was a god. All the other gods were the children and descendants of these two. One of these later gods was Marduk, who was described as outstanding in every possible way. The story went on to say that the gods ended up going to war against one another. One group of gods sided with the saltwater goddess Tiamat. She had snakes, dragons, and demons on her side. The leader of her army was an evil god named Kingu. The other group sided with a god named Ea, who had taken control of the sweet waters. In the creation story, Ea was definitely the protagonist, and Tiamat was the antagonist. Actually, Ea, who was also known as Enki, was almost always the good guy in Mesopotamian myths. Water was inevitably a good thing. You used it to drink and to water your crops, so it makes sense that its god was also always good. At this point in the story, Ea needed help in his fight against Tiamat, and he asked Marduk to lead his forces. Marduk agreed. There's an added complication here. Tiamat had control of an object called the Tablet of Destinies. The Babylonians believed that this mythical tablet held the power to bring order out of chaos. Everything in the universe went according to plan, so long as a sensible good god had control of the Tablet of Destinies. The sun rose every day. Crops grew. Animals procreated. Babies were born. The rivers provided irrigation water. Things were orderly. But if an unpredictable, erratic god had the Tablet of Destinies, then anything could happen. Chaos would reign. At this point in the story, right before the battle between Tiamat and Marduk, the gods still existed in a universe of water and wind, with no land or cities or human beings. Then Tiamat gave the Tablet of Destinies to her evil sidekick, Kingu, which was definitely a problem. Chaos was coming. At a banquet held before the battle, Marduk was given sovereignty over the whole universe by the gods who were on the side of Ea and Goodness. The armies of the gods didn't end up fighting one another. Instead, Tiamat and Marduk fought in single combat, hand to hand. After struggling against one another, Marduk forced the wind into Tiamat, insulating her like a balloon. Then he killed her with an arrow. He also killed her commander, Kingu, and took control of the Tablet of Destinies. At this point in the story, a Babylonian would probably breathe a sigh of relief. The Tablet was back in the hands of a sensible god. Order would be restored. And Marduk actually went about creating order out of Tiamat. He split her body in half like a clamshell and made it into the sky and the earth. Then he created shrines for the gods. It's interesting that the Babylonians thought the shrines had originally been created by the gods themselves. You can understand why they never ever wanted to move a shrine or a temple. As the creation story continues, Marduk created the constellations of stars in the sky and he created the moon. Then he made weather and he made springs and mountains and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. After this, Marduk gave the Tablet of Destinies to one of the oldest gods, the god of the heavens, Anu. Anu would keep it safe. The other gods then had a ceremony to thank Marduk. They gave him gifts and worshipped him. He was clearly the king of the gods at this point. He put a crown on his head and he put on royal robes. And then he made a speech announcing that he would live in Babylon, at the center of the world, and that other gods were welcome there. Remember, this is still a world without humans. The Mesopotamians believed that the gods had created everything just for themselves, even the cities. They were immortal and powerful, but they still had to do all the work of providing for themselves. Then Marduk made a decision to save the gods some labor. He would create a new creature, something that was not a god, but that would work for the gods. These would be humans. The god Ea used blood from the dead evil god Kingu to make humankind. At the end of this creation story, Marduk gave the gods their various realms and they built the city of Babylon, and then had another banquet. They swore an oath to support Marduk. The very act of reciting this story to the statue of Marduk helped restore order to the universe. Doing so every year, at the time of the new year, assured that chaos wouldn't sneak in. The Akitu festival continued after the creation epic was recited. More purifications took place, and more prayers were recited, and hymns were sung. Then a really strange ritual took place. Scholars have argued endlessly about what it meant. Here's what happened. The king of Babylonia washed his hands and came to the temple of Marduk, where he was greeted by the high priest. Just the two of them were present for this very important part of the festival. The priest was required to take away the king's scepter, circle, and sword and put them on a chair in front of the god. These were the symbols of kingship. Then the priest came back to the room where the king was waiting and struck him on the cheek. He hit him. He was required to. After that, the priest took the king into the holy room where Marduk's statue was located. Here's what the ritual text says next, and I quote, He, the priest, shall drag the king by the ears and make him bow down to the ground. The king shall speak the following only once. I did not sin, lord of the countries. I was not neglectful of the requirements of your godship. I did not destroy Babylon. I did not command its overthrow. I did not do something, this word is broken in the text, to the temple Esangil. I did not forget its rituals. I did not rain blows on the cheek of a subordinate. I did not humiliate them. I watched out for Babylon. I did not smash its walls. This is an amazing speech. The king was bowing on the ground, groveling in front of the god, swearing an oath that he had been good to Marduk and to his city and his temple. He even swore that he hadn't humiliated people who were his subordinates, which was pretty much everyone. You can imagine how Assyrian kings might have hesitated before going through this ceremony. The earlier Assyrian king Sennacherib would simply have been lying if he swore this oath. He had smashed the walls of Babylon. And Assyrian kings weren't in the habit of being dragged by their ears by their priests. This private ritual continued. The priest gave a speech in which he asked Marduk to bless the king and destroy his enemies. And the king got back his scepter, circle, and sword. But he wasn't done with being abused. The priest had to hit him in the face again, really hard this time. The text says, if when he strikes the king's cheek the tears flow, it means that the god Bel is friendly. If no tears appear, the god Bel is angry, the enemy will rise up and bring about his downfall. The king himself was an omen at this point. The king had better hoped that he cried. The moment when the king literally took the hand of Marduk came after this, on the eighth day of the festival. This is when the public part of the proceeding started. The statue of Marduk was brought out of the temple and the king took his hand. Somehow, the god spoke and announced his plans for the year. Now obviously statues don't speak, so it's unclear what this really meant. This was followed by a huge procession. At the front, Marduk and the king rode in a chariot, followed by other gods, along with musicians, singers, dancers, priests, officials, and royal family members. Usually, the gods were hidden away in the secret holy places in temples, but not now. The Babylonian population got a chance to actually see their gods. It was a time for celebration and people lined the streets. They knew that the secret rites must have taken place and a new good year lay ahead. Marduk and the other gods were all taken by boat to a special Akitu temple outside the city. There they were placed together in a room to meet, like some sort of divine G7 meeting. Some of the gods had traveled to Babylon from other cities. Their presence confirmed that Babylon was the greatest city and Marduk was the greatest god. A day later, the procession came back to Babylon. Marduk made another speech, however he did that, and returned to his temple and the other gods went home. The world was safe. But when the statue of Marduk was in Assyria, after Sennacherib's conquest of Babylon, none of this could happen. That must have been disorienting for the people. Maybe it terrified them. What awful things would take place if the Akitu festival was cancelled? Fortunately, the statue of Marduk was returned to Babylon in the reign of the Neo-Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal during the 7th century BCE, and the Akitu festival resumed. 50 years after that, when the Assyrian Empire fell in 612 BCE, the Babylonians credited Marduk with their success. The Babylonian king Nabopolassar was on the throne at the time. He had a son named Nebuchadnezzar, who was a very successful general during the war against Assyria. When Nabopolassar died in 605, Nebuchadnezzar II took over the Babylonian throne. He enjoyed a long reign of 43 years, and was responsible for many of Babylon's subsequent successes. Nebuchadnezzar continued to fight through most of his reign. A lot of regions of what had been the Neo-Assyrian Empire resisted being absorbed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Some of them, especially in the West, allied themselves with Egypt. The kingdom of Judah in the Levant was one of these. We know about this because the authors of the Bible wrote about it in detail. The kings of Judah stopped paying their tribute to Babylon. But Egypt didn't end up helping them. The Babylonian army showed up in Judah in response to a rebellion. And in 587 BCE, Judah was conquered. Vast numbers of Jews were now taken captive to Babylon. The Babylonians put a king on the throne in Judah, who was supposed to be loyal to them. But he rebelled as well. The Babylonians came back and besieged Jerusalem. More people were deported. Obviously, Nebuchadnezzar used the same kinds of strategies that the Assyrians had used before him. But unlike the Assyrian kings, Nebuchadnezzar didn't brag about his conquests in his royal inscriptions. Mostly, he bragged about his building activities. Nebuchadnezzar wanted Babylon to be extraordinary. If there was some way for us to see the city the way it looked during his reign, I think we'd find it dazzling. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed to a wrote that there is no other city that approaches to it. That's high praise from someone who was familiar with Athens and who had visited Egypt as well. But we don't know if Herodotus actually went to Babylon or if he described what other people had told him. He was way off on the size of the city. It was huge, but not even close to being as huge as he said. Herodotus said it was square, with each of the four sides of the city wall being 14 miles long. This would have been a total of 56 miles of city walls. In reality, the whole wall that surrounded the city was only about 10 miles long. Still, Babylon was bigger than Nineveh had been, and it was the biggest city that had ever existed in that region up to that time. It continued to be the biggest until Rome, centuries later. So it's unclear why Herodotus felt the need to exaggerate. But Herodotus liked to exaggerate. He might have been the father of history, but he didn't have any real concern about getting his numbers correct. Still, Herodotus did get a lot of things right about Babylon, as confirmed when archaeologists excavated the city. For now, let's say that Herodotus's description of Babylon was pretty accurate, except for the statistics. Combined with what archaeologists found, it gives us a sense of the grandeur of Nebuchadnezzar's building program. So, imagine you could take a tour of ancient Babylon. The obvious place to start is the Temple of Marduk. The whole temple complex was as big as two football fields, and was near the river that flowed through the middle of the city. There were two courtyards. In one was the ziggurat, and in the other was the lower temple. The ziggurat would have been visible for miles around. It was a giant stepped tower, with a shrine on the top. And it seems to have been seven levels high in Nebuchadnezzar's time. Ziggurats were made of solid brick, with an exterior stairway. The only room in it was at the top. Some ziggurats were painted in different colors, one color per level. But that probably wasn't true in Babylon. Anyway, Herodotus doesn't mention it. But the very top level was probably a bright blue, faced with blazed bricks. Herodotus says that the shrine on the top had a couch in it for the god to rest in. Some modern scholars think there might have been divine statues up there. We just don't know. The main statues of Marduk and Sarpanatum were in the lower temple called the Esangil. That's where the private ceremonies of the Akitu festival took place. The statues might have been made of solid gold. That's what Herodotus thought anyway. He said that the Marduk statue also had a gold table and a gold throne. And according to what he'd been told, these objects weighed a total of 800 talents. That's 22 tons of gold. Some scholars think that the statues might actually have been made of wood, with gold plating. Either way, they were certainly spectacular. The statues' eyes and hair would have been inlaid with other materials like shell, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. And they wore clothes that were finely woven and embroidered. Walking north from the Esangil, you'd be on the processional way, the same road that the gods took during the Akitu festival parade. It was wide, and the walls on both sides were tiled with glazed bricks in bands of bright blue and yellow, with white rosettes. A wide middle band of turquoise bricks provided the background for images of striding, growling lions, coloured white and brown and black. These lions were actually carved in relief. Each brick was created with part of the scene on it, molded before the bricks were baked. Then the bricks were put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Because the colourful glaze was fired in the kiln, the colours haven't faded much, even today. At the end of the processional way stood a kind of vision, the Ishtar Gate. This whole tall gateway was deep blue, with borders in white and yellow, and relief sculptures of bulls and dragons arranged in rows. It was entirely covered in glazed bricks, so it shone in the sun like a giant jewel. When German archaeologists excavated in Babylon during the early 20th century, they dismantled the Ishtar Gate, packed it up to take with them to Berlin. It was meticulously reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum. The gate is 50 feet high, and the original foundations extended another 45 feet underground. Now, back on our tour of Babylon, just before you pass through the Ishtar Gate, off to the left, was one wall of Nebuchadnezzar's palace. The palace was the size of many city blocks, built around five huge courtyards and surrounded with thick fortification walls. The layout looks a lot like the palaces of the Assyrian kings, like a labyrinth in a way, with vast numbers of offices, workshops, storage rooms, kitchens, domestic apartments and so on. But it would have been a different experience to visit. Take the throne room. Although the walls were brightly coloured, they weren't decorated with battle scenes. The same type of glazed brick reliefs that decorated the processional way and the Ishtar Gate were used in the palace as well. They featured stylized palm trees, rosettes, palmettes, naturalistic lions and other motifs from nature. Even the cuneiform inscriptions on the walls were carved onto glazed bricks and pieced together in the right places by the builders. Nebuchadnezzar doesn't seem to have been interested in being surrounded by sculptures of himself. Presumably he looked like other Assyrian and Babylonian kings, with a long beard and elaborate robes. But statues of him haven't been found. So it seems that the Babylonian kings adopted a lot of strategies from Assyria. Things like frequent military campaigns, sieges of enemy cities, deportations of rebellious populations and so on. But unlike the Assyrians, they didn't brag about these tactics in inscriptions or depict them in relief sculptures. They were, however, very interested in the past. A lot of their art seems to have been drawn from very ancient Babylonian models. In big public inscriptions, they even used a style of cuneiform from Hammurabi's era, more than a thousand years earlier. It was very different from the script that they used every day for practical purposes. Imagine if a text today were written in a script from the medieval period. That's the equivalent. After centuries of fighting Assyrian control, the Babylonians seemed to have had no interest in emulating Assyrian culture outside the military. In fact, there's remarkably little evidence for any Assyrian influence, even though the Assyrians were strongly influenced by Babylon. Instead, the Babylonian kings were making the point that they were the inheritors of a very ancient tradition and culture, one that had been started by the gods themselves when they created Babylon. As Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt Babylon, he even made a point of restoring buildings from centuries before, rather than knocking them down. Some scholars have called these Neo-Babylonian kings the sponsors of the world's first archaeology. When they found sculptures and objects from the past as they dug, they treated them carefully and put them in their palaces. In classical times, Babylon was best known for its city wall, which was listed in one version of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. This was another of Nebuchadnezzar II's achievements. The main wall was so wide that you could ride a chariot along the top. And in most parts of the city, three lines of these walls ran parallel to one another, along with a moat on the outside. The river Euphrates flowed right through the center of the city, with the two halves connected by a wooden bridge on top of stone piers. That was quite an engineering feat. So what was it like to live in this incredible city? People must have felt that they were living in the most modern, most extraordinary place. Even though individual houses and the lives of average citizens were much the same as they had always been, the city as a whole was on a scale unlike any other. People from all over the world, or at least the world they knew, lived there. Many of them had been deported from other parts of the empire, but most of them weren't slaves, and the records show that many of them thrived. Some documents found in Mesopotamian cities include Jewish names. These confirm that Jews from Judah were living there in exile, as the Bible said. There are even cuneiform records of the Judean king and his sons receiving plenty of rations from the Babylonian administration. So, Babylon was the center of the world in the view of the people who lived there, and it was home to many ideas. But it was also a place where people were deeply proud of their traditions. Today, it's hard for us to grasp this, but the Babylonians had no way of knowing that thousands of years of history and technological progress lay ahead for humankind. They didn't think of themselves as living in the ancient world. They looked back to their distant past for inspiration in art and architecture and tradition. To them, that was the ancient world. But they saw themselves as modern, living as we all do, right in the present, right at the very most recent moment that has ever existed.